Connections

Connections, friends, associates–whatever you call it, it is a list of people. Most of these people likely exist on many of your friends lists. Why do we need to maintain so many different lists of the same people? Obviously your connections between these people will vary to an extent, but that is where I think this idea could help. Some people are business associates, some people are family members, some people are poker buddies. These are different groups, but the important thing is that they are definable. A service could be made to allow people to track and categorize their many connections and share them with other social services. Say, for example that you work for a big company and are a member of the company softball team. One of your coworkers would perhaps be in your contact list under the categories “coworker” and “softball team”, possibly even “friends”…or possibly not? Maybe he’s a jerk.

Interactions

How many people out there have a blog, a Facebook account and a Twitter account that feel frustrated when they want to say something to everyone? Many services have begun to include “post to twitter” and “post to facebook” buttons which is a step in the right direction, but is not especially intuitive. The biggest issue with this approach is that the association is not retained. What if I later notice I need to fix a typo? Now I need to go to all the services I pushed to and make the edit. What if I make a horrible drunken rant in the middle of the night and decide, in my embarrassment the next morning, that I need to delete it? Now I need to go back through my updates on all these services and delete it.

Where am I going with all this?

I’ve been bouncing around the idea of building a web service inspired by the OpenID model. The service would provide a universal method of sharing connection and interaction data between connected services. This connection would allow users to administrate this data from any of these services and automatically identify connections of theirs that use that particular service. A master service would store a copy of all the data and would function as a pass-through that relays any additions, updates and deletions to all other connected services. Likely it would require a verification method so it knows whether or not the change has actually been made on each service. If a service happens to be down it could store the change in a message queue and try again later.

Ideas? Suggestions? Drunken rants? Any input is appreciated.

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